Someone said, “Woo!” and I could have killed them.
Eugene immediately set Myrtle on her feet. He stepped back, farther, releasing her completely. I still couldn’t see his face, but his posture returned to his military bearing. Myrtle, too, drew her hands away and clasped them behind her as if she were at parade rest and listened as he spoke.
I was so happy for them that it hurt. Swallowing, I turned to the engineer, who was gawking at them. I stepped into his line of sight and gestured with my sandwich to his schematic. “Is there anything I can help you with here?”
“Oh! Um…” He swallowed loudly. “I was just explaining that we’d detached and reseated all connectors. Nothing changed.”
“Good work.” I tried to switch both sandwiches to my left hand and ended up balancing them on my cast. Slightly awkward, but I was able to rest my hand on his shoulder and squeeze. “I’ll let Major Lindholm know.”
“Hey—” He wet his lips and looked toward Eugene, who was listening to Myrtle. “Do they know who did it?”
I took a slow breath. This type of suspicion could destroy the colony in ways that blowing it up couldn’t touch. “Leave that to Major Lindholm.”
“Oh … sure.” He tugged on his ear. “Should we be doing anything about that?”
I glanced over at Eugene. He was walking back to us, wiping the sleeve of his flight suit across his eyes. I squeezed the young man’s shoulder again. “Just keep doing good work.”
Before he could ask another question, I walked over to meet Eugene. He cleared his throat, fooling no one. “Just finished debriefing Myrtle—”
“You could have gotten a room for that.”
Let me tell you, making Eugene Lindholm blush is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. “Is that my sandwich?”
I held it out and yanked it away before letting him have it. “Sandwich for details on the debrief—the actual debrief. I don’t need to know about the state of her tonsils.”
The color of his skin deepened with a beautiful rosy undertone. He snatched the sandwich and started walking back to the stairs to LGC. “No sign of any explosion or impact, but as you heard the night makes it too dark to see much detail out there. Coming in, she used a flight path that let her circle the base. From the outside, everything looks nominal.”
“That’s good … although something definitive would be useful.” I sighed. “For future problems, we have a morale iss—”
“Nicole, what is this?” Eugene had stopped in his tracks. In his hand, there was a grease-stained piece of paper, covered with numbers.
Or rather, covered with a cipher in a very specific handwriting. “It was under the chairs. I just…” I sucked in a breath, turning back to look at Le Restaurant. “Oh shit.”
“There’s something worse?”
“When it was the women’s sickbay … that’s where Birgit’s bed was.”
* * *
I sequestered myself in the conference room with the cipher and a notepad. To brute-force a cipher, it helps to know what language it is written in. I knew of a fellow who used a simple Caesar cipher, but wrote his notes in Middle English. They were indecipherable.
This could be anything from English to French. Since Birgit was Swiss, it could also be German. I spoke all three of those, fortunately. Or it could be some random language, in which case all bets were off.
Once you get a crack, the entire thing can unfold in minutes. It’s finding the crack that’s the tricky part.
Someone tapped lightly on the door.
“Come in.” I straightened, sliding my reading glasses off my nose.
Eugene poked his head in. “Helen’s back. Are you … interruptible?”
“Yeah.” I tossed my glasses on the table, massaging the bridge of my nose. It wasn’t quite an ice pick between the eyes, more like someone trying to enter my head using their knuckle.
He pulled the door the rest of the way open, holding it for Helen, Myrtle, and Halim. Myrtle was carrying a CPK bag and set it down at the end of the table. Methodically, she pulled out food and set it in a rigid grid. Her jaw was tight.
I grabbed my papers, to make more room for her. Myrtle shook her head. “Don’t lose track of what you’re doing. I’ve got plenty of space.”
Helen’s hair was disheveled and matted against her head from her Snoopy cap. The indentation of her microphone arm was still pressed deep into the curve of her cheek as she dropped into the closest chair to the door.
Sitting down opposite me, Halim rubbed his nose and picked up one of the pages. I held still, hoping he would magically say, “Ah-ha! But it is Arabic!”
No such luck.
Eugene pulled the door shut. “First things: I talked to Vicky and asked her about The Long Tomorrow. She says Birgit gave it to her.”
“Troubling.” Which was a fairly significant understatement.
“There’s more. Go ahead, Helen.”
“The big picture. The Garden is fine. They have not lost power, but did lose comms for anything outside the facility. Because they did not lose power, they were able to tell us when the satellites went offline. It was at the top of our initial blackout window.”
I twitched. “That was before our team had removed the radio fuse. So … so the loss of satellites is not related?”
“I do not believe so.” Her voice was almost Katherine Hepburn crisp. “At the same time, their telemetry picked up a series of five impacts or explosions. The timing coincides with the flash Myrtle saw.”
There had been five satellites in orbit around the Moon. I’m guessing there were none now. For a man whose prayer had been answered, Eugene did not look happy.
“While we were docked, it occurred to me that the logs we have here regarding the BusyBees were incomplete, because Administrator Frisch was struggling with poison.” Helen folded her hands in her lap. “I took the opportunity to look at the logs at The Garden to see if anyone from our list of suspects had arrived there.”
Myrtle nodded and slid a sip-pack of soup to Helen. “Good thought. When we did the inventory of potential explosives, we didn’t look at the log.”
“Birgit Furst is recorded as arriving to do some work in their comms department. She was the only passenger. The name in the pilot’s slot was empty.” She turned to look at me. “Birgit was at the 99s the day your plane was sabotaged.”
The blood drained out of me and iced over the floor. “Flying a BusyBee is not the same as an airplane.”
Leaning forward, Halim groaned and rested his face in his hands. “I gave her simulator time.”
Hell … The first time I flew a BusyBee, all I’d had was simulator time too. In theory, Birgit actually could have flown herself out to The Garden.
I looked at my watch: “22:36 … So do we haul her out of bed and question her now, or wait until tomorrow?”
Eugene stood. “Fourteen hours without contact with Earth. We question her now.”
FORTY-THREE
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm:
May 27, 1963, 2306—Contact with The Garden and Marius Hills has been reestablished via BusyBee. Dispatched a reconnaissance flight to the South Pole outpost at 23:00. Pilot: Armstrong. Copilot: Aldrin. Nav/Comp: El-Mohtar.
Eugene really wanted to be in the room when we questioned Birgit, but they needed him in the LGC more. I’d unscrewed a couple of bulbs in the geology lab, so when Halim escorted Birgit in, my interrogation room was dim in the right ways.
Balancing on a pair of crutches, she was walking fairly well, with a makeshift brace on her left leg. When she saw me waiting she stopped and looked over her shoulder at Halim and beyond him to the astronaut standing guard outside the door. “What is going on?”
“Have a seat.” I patted the back of the chair we had set up for her in one of the bright spots of the geology lab. “We have some questions.”
Her eyes widened a fraction. “All right…” Birgit made her way to the chair and sat down with her left leg
stretched out in front of her.
As soon as she was seated, I walked to the table opposite her and picked up a clipboard. I do love a clipboard. Halim shut the door and stood beside me, which put him in the shadows. He crossed his arms over his chest and spread his legs into a wide, comfortable stance. I picked up a pencil from the table and flashed a smile. “We’ll try to be quick.”
“Quick about what?” She played with the wrapping on the handle of her crutch. Nervous, yes, but because the situation was odd or because she knew she was caught?
Always start with something known and verifiable. Get them used to answering questions, and then move on to harder ones.
“Your personnel file says you worked in munitions for the Swiss Army during the war.” I touched the eraser of the pencil to my lower lip, to make my curiosity clear. “Tell me about that.”
“Um…” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, they were mobilizing and … You know Switzerland has mandatory military service for able-bodied males, correct? So then, my brothers were conscripted and I wanted to with them go, so I volunteered.”
I nodded encouragingly, as if she were not telling me things that I already knew.
“As it happens, I was not stationed near them. In hindsight, it was foolish to hope so, but I was very young. Only fourteen, although, of course, I lied on my application. I was assigned to a munitions plant.” She shrugged. “It was hot and dusty and not very glamorous.”
On the clipboard, I made a note to confirm the math. It had not occurred to me to check her age for those wartime activities. According to her files she was thirty-eight, so … Fourteen. Fourteen when she started, but the war went on for years. So verifiably true and misleading because there is a vast difference between a fourteen-year-old in a munitions plant and a twenty-year-old.
“What did you do at the munitions plant?”
She looked at the piece of cloth she was worrying on her crutches. “I swept the floor.”
“Pardon?”
“I think they knew I was underage…” Her head came up suddenly and she leaned forward, trying to see past the shadows to my face. “Is this about the fuse they found? I can’t— If you need someone to disarm it, I can’t. I’m not qualified.”
She had jumped to the subject of the bomb very quickly. My challenge was to withhold judgment until I had a big picture. Any single piece wasn’t enough, so I waited to see if she would fill the silence with more information.
Birgit fidgeted in her chair for a moment. “I’m so sorry. I know I should not have let anyone believe I did work more complicated than that. It is only that I wanted so much to go into space. All I did was sweep the floor at the munitions factory.”
“I understand that.” I tapped my pencil on the clipboard, watching her. “Did you enjoy The Long Tomorrow?”
She blinked at the sudden change of topic and then the color drained out of her face. “The letter. This is about the letter.” Birgit’s head dropped forward. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“I just found it—the book, I mean. Outside the door to my sleeping compartment. There was a note ‘for Vicky’ and I thought that whoever left it had just put it in the wrong place, so I took it to Vicky. She didn’t know anything about it and then there was the letter and…” She glanced up at Halim, almost as if she were looking for reassurance, and then faced the floor again. “I’m so sorry, Nicole. When I realized the letter was yours, I should have brought it to you immediately.”
I tilted my head. “And why didn’t you?”
“It was—there was a code. I’m in communications and it is hard for me to see a cipher and not want to crack it.” She drew a breath and sat up straight, facing me directly. “We invaded your privacy and I am very sorry about that. It was unforgivable and I am ready to face whatever disciplinary action is mandated.”
“Mm.” I shrugged as if that were not important, and honestly, in this context it was not. What was interesting was that she had said we. “We invaded your privacy.” Again, true. They had, but “privacy” was a conversational tangent I did not need to explore. The “we,” though … “Then what happened?”
“Given the content, we thought it best to let Administrator Frisch know. So Vicky took the book to him.”
The fact that she had taken it to Vicky was consistent with Vicky’s story. The timing felt off, though. “There are a couple of things I don’t understand. If you don’t mind helping me with them I would appreciate it.”
“Of course.” She knit her hands together in her lap and leaned forward, in a picture of bright-eyed eagerness.
“Approach these in any order.” I ticked the inconsistencies off on my fingers. “One: the book was checked out of the library in Vicky’s name, but in your handwriting. Two: I only got the letter that morning and the airlock doors closed that afternoon. Let’s say, about four hours later. So I’m curious about how the letter got into the book, then to your door, and then you were able to find Vicky and translate it in enough time for her to get to the administrator before the airlock doors closed.”
Birgit’s eyes blinked rapidly. “The first is easy. It was a library book and we’d hoped looking at the records would tell us who left it for her. There wasn’t anything and it was filed as still being on the shelf. So I checked it out for her while she went to the administrator.” She aligned her crutches with the side of her chair. “But … But I got the book the night before the airlock closed. At first, I thought it was someone who knew I was sick, and then there was Vicky’s name.”
“Sick?”
“I thought it was the flu.” Her mouth twisted and she rested a hand on her left leg. Even through the trousers, it was visibly thinner than her right. “I was sick for a couple of days, and then better for about a week, and then … this.”
“Hm … You got a copy of this mysterious letter before I did. What are your thoughts on how that happened?”
“That’s easy. Or … I mean, mechanically, it is easy. Mail comes in via teletype to comms and then we have to sort it. If it came in after you checked your box, then you wouldn’t see it until the next day.” She shook her head. “I don’t know who would have taken it, though.”
“So you’re saying a random person took a letter from my box, checked out the one book that could decode it, and just happened to leave it for you?”
“I told you! It said it was for Vicky. I got it by mistake.”
Beside me, Halim shifted his weight. “Do you still have the note that said ‘for Vicky’?”
“I gave it to her with the book.”
I fed Birgit more silence to see what she would fill it with. The geology lab fans whirred with an almost static hiss. Outside the room, wheels squeaked as something was rolled down the hall.
Birgit swallowed. “I really am very, very sorry about reading the letter. I just … Can I blame it on having a fever?” She laughed nervously and then shook her head, sagging into her chair. “I’m sorry. I know better.”
I could not count the number of times I had played the contrite Mädchen. Her rendition looked sincere, but so had mine. The tricky thing about reading body language is that it’s only one piece of a larger whole. I mean, she certainly reeked of guilt. But one of the easiest ways to mitigate being caught is to pin your guilt to a different action than the Big Thing that you don’t want to be accused of. She had jumped straight to “I’m bad” the moment I had brought up the book.
“On Tuesday, the sixteenth of April, you went to The Garden. Why?” According to the more detailed briefing Helen gave us after her big-picture synopsis, Birgit did some unscheduled work in comms for about two hours and then excused herself, not feeling well. Her BusyBee’s departure time was not logged until nearly six hours after that, again with no pilot.
“To work in comms.”
I waited. Birgit tucked her hair behind her ear, but stayed silent.
“The Garden has you arriving after the start of the mo
rning shift, why so late? And then only staying two hours.”
“I didn’t get the notification on time. By the time I got out there, they were covered. I’d started feeling sick, so, since they didn’t really need me, I left.” She picked at the wrapping on her crutch again, grimacing, and shuddered. “In hindsight, I was already sick with polio. I’m just so grateful no one there caught it because of me. I keep thinking about that—I’m so, so glad I was out of the room before I started … you know. Vomiting.”
“According to the schedule, you weren’t supposed to be on duty at all.”
She looked up, frowning. “No. I was.”
I flipped to a page on my clipboard where I had the staff sheet from the week of April fifteenth. “I have the schedule right here.”
When I held it out so she could look at it, Birgit shook her head. “That’s the original one, which is why I thought I wasn’t scheduled. They revised it after our rocket crashed, but I didn’t see it immediat—”
The lights went out.
I straightened. This wasn’t supposed to still be happening—the engineers had removed remote access to the RPCM, I thought. The emergency lights gave a brief flicker and died. We’d replaced the batteries in critical areas, but the geology lab was not one of them.
Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out a flashlight. Beside me, I heard a rustle of cloth from Halim. His flashlight clicked on a moment before mine did. In the halation of the light, I could just make out his face. He nodded toward Birgit and trained his light on her.
Whatever was happening was not something that would be solved by us running out, no matter how much I wanted to know why we’d lost power. Instead, I pointed my flashlight at my clipboard and collected my thoughts. “Do you have a copy of the version that says you were scheduled?”
“No. Why would I keep that?” She shifted in her chair, squinting against the light. “They didn’t need me, anyway.”
The Relentless Moon Page 40
